Secrets The CIA Doesn't Want You To Know

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/jfk-assassination-from-the-vault--4127240/support.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
In nineteen fifty nine, the CIA is confronting a new enemy,
Fidel Castro, the man who threatens to spread communism across
America's backyard.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
The fear for the United States was that a Cuban
style revolution would explode throughout Latin America.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
The US President Dwight Eisenhower wants him assassinated, and the
CIA is given a job. But they need someone who
can break through his tight security. Their unlikely weapon a
nineteen year old woman named Marie de lorenz She was.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
The natural choice because she could get through all of
the protective layers that Fidel hit around him, and she
could get into his bed.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
This is the story of one of the most extraordinary
CIA operations of them all. It will involve the Mafia,
a Watergate burglar, and Castro's lover.

Speaker 4 (01:03):
He looked at me, Did you come to kill me?

Speaker 1 (01:34):
This, the most bizarre CIA assassination attempt of them all,
begins with a chance encounter that took place in the
port of Cuba's capital city, Havana. A nineteen year old
German American woman named Marita Lorenz Is on the deck
of her father's cruise liner, the MS Berlin.

Speaker 4 (01:57):
I was on board the ship. My father was sleeping.
I saw this launch coming, and it was coming closer
and closer, and then finally they stood up and waved,
and I saw that they all had guns, and all
wore green uniforms and had beards. The launch came up

(02:25):
very close, and he just held on to the railing.
He looked up and I looked down. He said, I'm
coming up and I said well, and he said yes,
and I said, well, who are you? And he just
looked at me, but he said, this is coming down

(02:47):
to Fidel Castro.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
Fidel Castro is the most notorious revolutionary in the world.
Just one month earlier, at the age of thirty two,
he sees his power in Cuba. In January nineteen fifty nine,
he overthrows an American backed dictator and turns his people

(03:16):
against the United States. Castro becomes Prime Minister of Cuba
and forms a close economic and military alliance with the
Soviet Union. Now, his friendship with the Soviets and his

(03:38):
desire to spread his communist revolution throughout Latin America is
sending shockwaves back to the United States.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
We didn't realize there was a threat right in the
United States backyard until it was too late.

Speaker 5 (03:52):
A Castro had seize power.

Speaker 2 (03:54):
We had to focus our attention because this had the
potential to become a communist big in our hemisphere.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
Cuba is only ninety miles away from the American coast.

Speaker 3 (04:11):
Cuba was so close to the United States, and it
was potentially a place where missiles could be launched directly
against the United States. I mean, what a strategic advantage Fidel.

Speaker 1 (04:20):
Here Eisenhower recognizes that Castro is a serious emerging threat
to the US that needs to be dealt with. But
the young Marita knows nothing about this man who's about
to come on board her father's ship.

Speaker 4 (04:42):
Very flirtatious, looking at my eyes, trying to size me up.

Speaker 1 (04:50):
As they come together, nineteen year old Marita lorenz Is
swept away by Castro's charisma.

Speaker 4 (05:00):
His eyes, and that was it. Lost in love. I
fell in love, and that's the first time I kissed him.
And then my father stormed in, and that's that picture

(05:22):
of me sitting at the table with the first officer
in Fidel And immediately I pulled my hand away so
proba I wouldn't see.

Speaker 1 (05:34):
Marita's father invites Castro to stay for dinner that evening
before he takes his ship and his daughter back to
New York.

Speaker 4 (05:41):
I remember standing on the top deck when we pulled
out of the harbor and missing him and feeling terrible.

Speaker 6 (05:52):
I've got to.

Speaker 4 (05:53):
See him again.

Speaker 1 (05:55):
As soon as Marita returns to the city for del
Castro calls and invite her back to Cuba. This is
the beginning of a passionate love affair.

Speaker 4 (06:06):
I hadn't even unpacked. He said, how are you? I
miss you, and with his bad English, asked me to
come back. I send you airplane and I ended up
back in Havana with the same suitcase I hadn't unpacked.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
A week later, Mariita leaves her family's ship and moves
into Castro's penthouse apartments on the twenty fourth floor of
the Havannah Hilton.

Speaker 4 (06:40):
I felt absolutely terrified, happy, frustrated, crazy, and defying my
parents without telling them I was very guilty. I was
taken to a suite twenty four oh eight, which linked
to twenty four six. The doors. First thing I remember

(07:09):
the smell of cigars. This is his place. I look
around and there's all his uniforms and this beautiful music.
It was the record that never stopped it played over
and over and over again, and boots turned upside down,
and ashtrays with cigars in it, and then I see toys,

(07:35):
little tanks, and then a bazouka sticking out from under
the bed. This was where Fidel was living. And that
kind of scared me a little bit, you know, But

(07:57):
I don't have anywhere to go even if I tried.
The hall was filled with bodyguards and it was Fidel
sweet and they just said wait and don't go out,
just wait, and I did just that. I waited and
waited and waited. All of a sudden, I hear the

(08:20):
door swing open. Then he came in and picked me
up and swung me around, and I leased you so much,
you know, and love talk. And that's a moment I'll
never forget.

Speaker 1 (08:46):
The CIA has been looking for ways of getting to Castro,
and they've just stumbled on their first big break.

Speaker 7 (08:53):
It would have very close access to Fidel. Fidel, I'm
sure had very very tight security. He would have bodyguards
with in protective detail wherever he went.

Speaker 8 (09:02):
Or he has. Fidel Castro from the very beginning enjoyed
very very good personal security, very good. It's comparable to
the best anywhere in the world. He created one of
the world's best intelligence and counter intelligence organizations.

Speaker 1 (09:18):
Pack in Washington. CIA agents realized that nineteen year old
Marita Lorenz maybe exactly what they are looking for.

Speaker 9 (09:27):
Here.

Speaker 7 (09:27):
You have one of the prime targets by the US
government and the CIA, Fidel Castro himself, So anybody that's
accompanying him, around him, or anywhere connected with him is
going to be known in detail by US intelligence.

Speaker 1 (09:44):
The CIA realizes Marita could be a valuable asset, and
they are studying every move.

Speaker 7 (09:54):
Marita had a romantic relationship with him. A romantic relationship
would actually get her into his bedroom, so she would
be able to bypass all of his security layers. She
would be the ultimate recruitment target for the CI and
for the US government. No one could track him down
except for this one person who was his lover.

Speaker 1 (10:22):
In April nineteen fifty nine, Fidel Castro is invited to
the US by the Society of Newspaper Editors. Castro accepts
the invitation, hoping to win over American public opinion as
tensions between the two countries steadily rise. Marita accompanies him

(10:44):
on their eleven day visit. The CIA is, of course
there too.

Speaker 7 (10:54):
What the CIA would use is what's called the foreign
agent recruitment cycle, and that cycle consists of first spotting
a targeted person that has direct access to person that
you're after. The spotting could have very possibly occurred when
Marita was either in Havana or be a strong possibility
it could occur when she traveled to the United States

(11:16):
with Fidel and he met with Nixon.

Speaker 4 (11:18):
He came to New York and anticipation of seeing President Eisenhower,
and instead Eisenhower rejected him and pushed him off to Nixon,
which absolutely infuriated Fidel. He felt very angry that he

(11:38):
wasn't accepted with open arms as the new leader of Cuba.

Speaker 7 (11:45):
That would have been a prime opportunity for her to
be spotted, without question.

Speaker 9 (11:49):
He was meeting with Nixon.

Speaker 7 (11:50):
That was a high level meeting, and you can be
sure that US intelligence was all over that visit. Then
they would assess the person, their vulnerabilities, whether they were
available for recruitment. Then they would develop that person, befriend them,
find certain switches maybe that they could use, and then

(12:12):
finally they'd make the pitch, would you come over and
work with us and can we use you in our operation.

Speaker 1 (12:29):
After two blissful months, Marita learns that she is pregnant
with Castro's child.

Speaker 4 (12:36):
I was happy to be pregnant, very happy. I wanted it.
I wondered what it was going to be. He said, Oh, wonderful.
Half German, half Cuman, I said, and American. And he
was very happy. He said, Now I have to build
another hospital.

Speaker 1 (13:00):
But Marita realizes there are limitations to being Fidel Castro's lover.

Speaker 4 (13:07):
I understood that he belonged to Cuba. He made that
very clear. He belonged to everybody, and to Cuba first,
and to nobody but to Cuba.

Speaker 1 (13:22):
By now, the US is becoming increasingly concerned by Castro's popularity.

Speaker 8 (13:27):
Fidel Castro was a Titanic figure when he won powered
on New Year's Day in nineteen fifty nine. He had
come down from the mountains of Cuba after a two
year insurgency. He was the hero of the Cuban population.
He was a young man, he was thirty two years old,
and there was an appeal the beard and the costume
that he cultivated very very carefully, almost never being seen

(13:51):
out of that gorilla costume. He was admired in much
of Latin America, especially among the youth, the university students, nationalists,
and of course the radical left. It was just weeks
after he won power and Fidel began very stridently attacking

(14:13):
the United States in speeches. He did this in speech
after speech he announced the United States.

Speaker 1 (14:22):
If the Americans don't like what is happening in Cuba,
they can land the Marines and then there will be
two hundred thousand gringoes dead. Even if the Yankee imperialists
prepare a bloody drama for America, they will not succeed
in crushing the people's struggles. They will only arouse universal
hatred against themselves, and such a drama will also mark

(14:43):
the death of their greedy and carnivorous system. It is
the end of nineteen fifty nine and US Cuban relations
are deteriorating rapidly.

Speaker 8 (14:56):
It looked pretty clear now that Fidel was abandoning any
pretense of democracy, of fair governments, of human rights.

Speaker 3 (15:05):
He began to.

Speaker 8 (15:06):
Support violent incursions interventions against other Latin American leaders. He
was aggressively exporting the Cuban Revolution to other countries, and
thinking in Washington was becoming much more focused on we've
got to do something about this.

Speaker 1 (15:28):
It is now that the US government realizes that Castro
must be removed.

Speaker 8 (15:35):
The CIA were highly regarded in Washington in those days,
and the belief was that covert action against Castro was
the best instrument to use.

Speaker 1 (15:49):
What happens next is a bizarre and strange mystery, but
one that eventually leads to Marita being put in contact
with the CIA. There is alone in Castro's penthouse apartments
in the Havana Hilton. The birth of their child is
predicted for the beginning of December, and Marita has just

(16:09):
ordered her room service breakfast.

Speaker 4 (16:14):
Everything was fine, getting big, getting ready for the baby.
I had ordered breakfast and I drank the milk. I
felt dizzy. I said, well, maybe this is just because
of the pregnancy. But no. All I remember was falling

(16:44):
backwards on the bed and I was out. And then
I woke up in a car, and I was being
driven somewhere, and I was like half asleep, and then
I was out.

Speaker 1 (17:00):
Marita's memory of what happens next is very hazy. She
has glimpses of events that she can only partially recall.

Speaker 4 (17:08):
The next thing I remember is lights, a light above
me and arguing, arguing back and forth, cursing in the Spanish.
They were arguing about Fidel. I don't know if they're
arguing at him or with him, or against him, or

(17:28):
for him or what. I couldn't make it out, and
I don't know if my clothes were on or off,
or somebody's moving my body back and forth.

Speaker 1 (17:39):
Marita is seven and a half months pregnant and senses
that something shocking is happening to her baby.

Speaker 4 (17:46):
Terrible pain, terrible pain. But I was like half gone.
I thought the baby was bored. For a moment, I
heard a baby cry. I had a needle my arm,
and the pain was unbearable, and I felt wet, made

(18:07):
me frightened, and I started to cry, and that's all
I remember, and then I woke up back in my suite.

Speaker 1 (18:36):
Marisa is so ill. One of Castro's aides arranges for
her to fly back to New York for urgent medical treatment.
FBI agents are there as her plane touches Dad.

Speaker 4 (18:50):
The FBI met me at the airport and I went
straight to Roosevelt Hospital under FBI protection, surrounded by them.

Speaker 1 (19:03):
Unbeknown to Marita, this is the beginning of her involvement
with the CIA plot to kill Castro after a forced
abortion performed when she was drugged and kidnapped from Castro's residence.
Marita is now suffering from blood poisoning and requires immediate surgery,

(19:26):
and she's about to find out what has really happened
to her.

Speaker 7 (19:34):
It is apparent that she underwent a forced abortion in Havana,
and then the question would be was that done by
the Cuban government? Was done by the US government of
the CIA, And based on my knowledge of the kind
of operations that happened back then, personally, I don't think
the CIA would have done that.

Speaker 9 (19:54):
It would be my opinion.

Speaker 7 (19:56):
Perhaps that Castro himself may have been behind that. He
had several and it's very possible that Marita was not
the only one, and if a child was born, it
could have caused him, possibly some political ramifications.

Speaker 1 (20:09):
The CIA agents begin to use the abortion as a
way to turn her against Castro.

Speaker 7 (20:15):
If Castro was behind this forced abortion, then that would
be the ultimate development tool to use with Marita, because
that would be a classic betrayal not just by her
romantic lover, but also the loss of her child caused
by Fidel Castro.

Speaker 1 (20:37):
The CIA now initiates its plan to turn Marita into
their assassin.

Speaker 7 (20:44):
The next step and the recruitment cycle it is called
the development, and at that point they would approach Marita
and begin developing her.

Speaker 1 (20:52):
First, the CIA agents played the good car and try
to win her confidence.

Speaker 4 (20:57):
After the hospital stay, I was allowed to go home
under twenty four hour guard and recover physically and mentally
and emotionally. It had the agents around me every day,
giving me so called vitamins, and they took turns watching
me day and night and day and night.

Speaker 7 (21:20):
The agency would now know the vulnerabilities that Marita had
after the assessment, and to develop her, they would begin
appealing to those vulnerabilities.

Speaker 4 (21:30):
I was heartbroken. I was sad. I was lonely.

Speaker 9 (21:43):
She was betrayed.

Speaker 7 (21:44):
She had an abortion to a child that obviously she'd
loved and wanted to keep. She was emotionally traumatized. She
wound up in a US hospital alone, so they'd begin
appealing to that.

Speaker 4 (21:57):
They started this program, Let's get even with him. He
did this to you, Let's get even with him.

Speaker 7 (22:05):
He didn't do anything about it, left her in the cold,
So he wasn't the person that she thought he was.

Speaker 4 (22:10):
I was nineteen. I was very naive when it came
to matters of politics or international foreign policy affairs or
love affairs.

Speaker 7 (22:20):
They're going to try to convince her that the United
States is the good guy and Fidel Castro is the
bad guy.

Speaker 4 (22:28):
They repeated things over and over and over and again
about Fidel doing this, Fidel that, feedel this. I would
have these crying jags where I would curl up into
a ball and cry my eyes out, warning the baby

(22:48):
and throwing things, you know, and they would give me
pills to calm me down. They would say, that's the
anger coming out, and you have to do something to
get rid of that anger.

Speaker 10 (23:01):
You know.

Speaker 1 (23:03):
Before the CIA agents can go any further with Marita,
they need to know that she has been telling them
the truth about her past.

Speaker 7 (23:11):
The next very important step is you have to vet
the person the target. It's critically important because we've had
many times, many cases where a person has come over
and they've become a double agent or were a double agent.
So to vet in this case Marita, the agency would
have to corroborate all the information she provided or trips

(23:32):
back to.

Speaker 9 (23:33):
A van and that all her records would be checked, or.

Speaker 7 (23:35):
Travel records, the people that knew her over there if
we had access to them, and the procedure would not
proceed forward until the agency was absolutely convinced that the
information she was providing was credible.

Speaker 1 (23:57):
Having worked on her personal relationship with Castra, planting the
seed that he is the bad guy, they now need
to get her on their side politically, the CIA agents
begin to dig deeper into Marita's past. Marita tells them

(24:18):
she was born in Germany on the eighteenth of August
nineteen thirty nine, and two weeks later her country invaded Poland.

Speaker 4 (24:26):
I'm the child of the war. Oh I remember is
hard times.

Speaker 1 (24:32):
The agents learned that her father, Heinrich, was a German
submarine captain. Marita informs them that her mother, Alice, was
a spy for both the French resistance and the British
intelligence during World War Two.

Speaker 4 (24:46):
My first memories of her were in the basement where
she would do Morse code.

Speaker 1 (24:55):
She tells them that in nineteen forty four, her mother's
cover was blown and that she was thrown into the
NATZI German bergen Belsen concentration camp. Marita, then only five
years old, accompanied her there.

Speaker 4 (25:07):
I was incarcerated in a s s Holme and then
transferred to Belsen.

Speaker 1 (25:15):
At the end of the war. In nineteen forty five,
the Belsen concentration camp was liberated and Marita said she
was finally rescued.

Speaker 4 (25:23):
It was this British ambulance driver that found me half
dead under a bonk and Belsen and pulled me out.

Speaker 1 (25:38):
In nineteen fifty, the family moves to the United States,
settling eventually in New York, and life begins to improve
for Marita. The story of Marita's brutal childhood in Germany
allows the CIA agents to play on her loyalty to
her new country, the country that's made her happy and

(26:00):
the country that Castro is now threatening to destroy. Planting
the sea that Castro is the bad guy in their relationship,
they now broaden their approach to include his hatred of America, and.

Speaker 7 (26:15):
They'd bring out the information such as Castro was determined
on invading the United States, overturning the US government. He
was a bad guy, he was affiliated with the Russians.
He hadn't told her any of that information.

Speaker 9 (26:29):
She didn't know any of that.

Speaker 4 (26:30):
You didn't know that, Nore. You're too dumb to blind,
you know it? Would curse at me. They would keep
me in the room, they wouldn't open the window, I
wouldn't go out. They would just bring food, and I
felt confined and all they ever talked about. Look, here's
more proof. See he's a comedy. He's nothing but a

(26:52):
damn comic, and you have to do something.

Speaker 1 (27:01):
Having now softened Marita up, the agents come clean and
ask her to join them.

Speaker 7 (27:08):
The final step in the recruitment process would be the pitch,
and that's when you actually ask the person to come
over and work for the CIA, US intelligence, and ultimately
the US government.

Speaker 4 (27:20):
The CIA said to me, now you can work for us.

Speaker 1 (27:28):
After weeks of developing Marita, she agrees to join them.
Only now do the CIA agents finally disclose the real
purpose of their mission.

Speaker 4 (27:39):
We want you to take them out. And I said you,
what are you trying to tell me to kill them?
And they said, well, we don't use those words. It's
just kind of neutralizing. Look, can you just put something
in his food and put him to sleep? You would
never know and you would leave. I said, I can't

(28:03):
kill him.

Speaker 1 (28:08):
The CIA now ramp up the horror of a world
under Castro's control. You try to explain to Marita that
the future of the United States is at stake.

Speaker 7 (28:18):
They would have to have her so convinced that Castro
had absolutely betrayed her, that his so laime was to
invade the United States and overturn the US government, that
the lives of millions of American people were at state,
that the US Constitution was at stake, and it possibly
a nuclear war was at stake, and she was one
of the only ones that could stop that.

Speaker 4 (28:39):
And I started to believe him. You're going to be
a good citizen. And I wanted to be good. I
didn't want to be bad.

Speaker 9 (28:48):
You have to do this.

Speaker 7 (28:49):
You have to do this not just for you and
your freedom, but for the United States and the people
in the United States.

Speaker 4 (28:56):
Ninety miles away. You know that's how close he is.
You could almost walk there, You could jump a puddle.
You know that's how close he is. Just think of it, Rita,
you will save this country from evils of communism. And
how proud my mother would be, and how proud we

(29:18):
would be. Then I would have a star in the
CIA building in Langley.

Speaker 1 (29:30):
Eventually, it seems the CIA tactics have worked.

Speaker 4 (29:34):
They slowly convinced me and I said, well, maybe they
weren't all that wrong. If it that was unpredictable, you
could push that button. If I went ahead and just
slipped him something to go to sleep, I would prevent
an invasion. And then I thought, I have to go
back and kill him.

Speaker 1 (30:00):
Towards the end of December nineteen fifty nine, the CIA
needs to be sure that she's a willing agent, so
they sent her back to Cuba. Marita enters the country
as an American tourist, but her real task is to
gauge how Castro will react to seeing his lover. After

(30:22):
six weeks recuperating in New.

Speaker 4 (30:23):
York, they wanted me to not be absent too long
from Fidel. They didn't want him to think that I
had become a turncoat and working for them.

Speaker 7 (30:36):
Now, if Mariita was sent by the agency back to Havana,
that would be a vetting process. Obviously, if she was
a double agent, or if she had provided false information
and went back to Havana, she would stay there.

Speaker 4 (30:53):
I had the keys to the suite room twenty four
oh eight, and I could just walk in and walk out,
and the toys are still there, the music is still there,
the boots are still there, his closest to the closet.

Speaker 7 (31:10):
So she went there, and she behaved the way that
her handlers in the US had told her to do,
did the things that they told her to do, and
then if she came back, then that would be a
very very good indication that she was indeed now properly
assessed and recruited.

Speaker 1 (31:30):
Marita passes the test. The CIA now prepares the assassination plan.
At the beginning of January nineteen sixty, the CIA instructs
Marita to travel to Miami to meet a man called

(31:50):
Frank Sturgis, a former US Marine. Sturgis fights alongside for
del Castro in the nineteen fifties and becomes his chief
of Air Force Intelligence. But when stur Just realizes the
direction Castro's revolution is heady, he changes sides and now

(32:12):
he's working for the CIA.

Speaker 3 (32:14):
Some people in the press call him in real life
James Bond, and he certainly was. He used over thirty
different aliases in his career as a spy and is
an assassin. I lived with Frank for a year in
Miami when I was in college. He had a whole
drawer full of phony IDs. I mean, some of them

(32:36):
were from South American countries. I mean the man was
clearly he was a man of action. He didn't just
sit around and talk about his beliefs. He firmly, deeply
believed in the freedoms that we have here in the
United States and didn't like communism. He didn't like the
total control of the individual's life, and took a stand

(32:57):
against those things and basically ways to war against Fidel Castro.
When Marita Lorenz met with Frank Sturgist in January of
nineteen sixty to proceed with this plot to assassinate Fidel Castro,
Frank at that point was working hand in hand with
the CIA in an attempt to overthrow the Fidel Castro government.

(33:21):
He told me that Marita was a very intelligent, beautiful, secure,
nineteen twenty year old long. He was very impressed with
her and in terms of her maturity for her young age,
she basically was thrust on to a kind of a
world stage in terms of the relationship she had with Fidel.

Speaker 1 (33:43):
Sturgi's job is to come up with a suitable murder
weapon for Marita to use against Castro. Should it be
a gun, a knife. Eventually he decides on poison pills.
To get hold of the poison, sturg just turns to
an unlikely source to obtain it.

Speaker 3 (34:05):
When Frank Steorger just told me the story, I said, poison.
You know, how do you get where do you come
up with poison? Frank? And he looked at me and said, well,
I got him from some friends. And I said, Franz,
He said, let's just say a close family of friends.
And of course I knew he was talking about the mafia.

Speaker 1 (34:30):
The thought that the CIA working with the mafia is
not such a far fetched idea. The Mob had controlled
much of Cuba's gambling interests for fifty years, but when
Castro came to power, he kicked them out. The Mob
knows that if Castro was taken out, they can move
back in.

Speaker 3 (34:54):
The mafia, and the CIA get a community of interest
in terms of getting Hi into the Fidel and so
I think all those things kind of gelled together in
this particular plot.

Speaker 7 (35:08):
It is clear and there is documented evidence that between
nineteen sixty nineteen sixty five, the CIA did approach the
mafia to obtain the poison pills to use against specifically Castro.
The reason that they would do that, obviously is the
mafia could get these poisons illegally, which the United States

(35:32):
could not do or even the CI officers would prefer
not to do.

Speaker 1 (35:47):
Stir just gives Marie to the pills containing bochelism toxin.
The weapon is very carefully chosen. They are not traceable.
They would dissolve completely and invisibly in liquid. There will
be no odor or taste. Critically, they will be easy
to use for someone emotionally involved because the death will

(36:10):
not be unpleasant.

Speaker 7 (36:16):
They would portray to her that, look, this is a
very easy way to go. It's you're you're not going
to be pulling a trigger on a gun. There's no
violence in this, and it's a merciful way to do it,
to use poison. Really, this is the most painless, soft
way to do it. Castor won't suffer at all.

Speaker 1 (36:46):
The CIA has got their agent and their murder weapon.
All that is left now is to set their assassin emotion.
The problem facing the CIA is that Castro has no routine,
no set pattern, which drives the agents wild with frustration.

(37:08):
He is in Havana one minute and across the other
side of the island the next. Even his closest associates
have little idea where he will be spending the night.

Speaker 4 (37:20):
He had no hours, he had no timing. Nobody could
make an appointment with him. It was always six or
eight hours late. His march is meant nothing. He would
come and go as he pleased, and he wished. Nobody
ever knew what he was going to do.

Speaker 9 (37:38):
He was a pretty hard target.

Speaker 7 (37:40):
So they would have to find out a routine, a habit,
something that would occur pretty regularly, so they could have
things set up to occur at that time or that place.

Speaker 1 (37:49):
Eventually, CIA agent spot a pattern. Castro gives regular public
television broadcasts to tell his people how they are all
benefiting from the revolution. The CIA agents discover that whenever
he is going to make a live television speech, he

(38:10):
stays at his penthouse in the Havannah Hilton. Just after
New Year, the CIA sends Marita back to Havana to
assassinate Castra. She is told they have intelligence that he

(38:30):
will be at the penthouse that night.

Speaker 9 (38:33):
This was one of the most tense times in US.

Speaker 7 (38:35):
History in terms of intelligence and military involvement in the
Cold War, in our relationship with Russia and their connection
to Cuba, so this operation would have been of utmost
importance to the CIA and of the US government.

Speaker 4 (38:56):
I was in the plane. I was gonna go to Kilpidelia.
The pills made me nervous.

Speaker 1 (39:05):
Marita, terrified she will be stopped going through customs, decides
on an extra precaution to try and conceal the poisoned pills.

Speaker 4 (39:12):
I went into the bathroom and I put them in
a cold cream jar, and I felt better. I felt
I'd be okay going through customs.

Speaker 1 (39:24):
The ninety mile trip from Miami to Havana takes about
thirty minutes. Marita makes it through customs unchecked. It seems
her trick with the cold cream has worked. Marita now
heads to the Havanna Hilton and Fidel Castro's penthouse sweep.

Speaker 4 (39:42):
I felt important. I almost felt like it was even
a grasp that I couldn't get out of, and that
I was going to be saving American lives if I
took this one life. I walked right in and sluck
in a bathroom, closed the door, hoping, if you're not

(40:04):
walking right now. I was nervous because I have this
man's life in my hands, all because of these little
tiny pills. My heart was crying, Oh God, I was
absolutely scared.

Speaker 1 (40:26):
Marita's mission is to place the poison pills and Castro's
drink to assassinate him. But they are covered in coal cream,
which is sticking to the pill. It's like glue.

Speaker 4 (40:37):
I tried to wipe the cold cream off the pills. Oh,
I was panicking. My god, there was no way I
could grasp the pills.

Speaker 1 (40:51):
Marita now desperately tries to abort the mission.

Speaker 4 (40:56):
And I just took them like that, and they wouldn't
go down, and they kept floating. I was panicking. I
thought I heard the door and Fidel was coming in,

(41:17):
pushing them never down, and one went down and the
other one didn't. And I smelt like cold cream, and
Fidel walks in. I said, you know, I love you,
I love you. I'm back. I'm in to stay this
and that, you know. He lay down on the bed

(41:43):
like nothing. He said, you're back. What you been up
to hanging around those Miami people? And when he said that,
oh my god, he knows, he knows, and he just

(42:07):
looked at me and shook his head. And then he
just took off the gun belt and threw it over
the lamp and he took the gun out of the holster.

(42:35):
I thought that he's gonna shoot me, but then he
flipped it around and he gave it to me. He
looked at me and he said, did you come to
kill me? He left himself white, open, vulnerable. He turned

(43:03):
to his side, you know, like she's got the gun
in her hand. What is she going to do? Who
is she really? He was, for a split second a
little nervous, and then he just took a puff of
smoke and a cigar and closed his eyes. He said,
nobody can kill me, Nukah, nobody ever can kill me.

(43:28):
I ejected the magazine out of the gun and then
I put the gun back in the holster and then
he said come here, and that was the end of that.
I could have killed him, but I didn't kill him.

(43:49):
I went to bed with him. He took the phone
off the hook. I was so relieved about the pills.
I was even afraid of that by makeup case would
come walking out of the basket. But I made love
to him and it was as beautiful as ever. But

(44:13):
something was missing. It was the baby.

Speaker 1 (44:19):
On the same evening, Marita flies back to Miami and
tells the CIA she has failed to kill Castro.

Speaker 3 (44:27):
Frank felt that Marita lost her nerve on this particular assignment,
mainly because of her feelings about Fidel. The old emotions
if you will took over and she just wasn't willing
to take the step to actually to end his life.

Speaker 7 (44:46):
You know, the CIA is not always successful in what
it does, and it has failed a number of times.
We never know about that because it's an enclosed, secret world,
So failure is something that the CIA is used to.
So if Marita was not successful in her operation, the

(45:06):
agency would just move on to the next plan.

Speaker 9 (45:08):
That's exactly what they did.

Speaker 1 (45:13):
Marita's failure causes the CIA to realize they will need
to continue exploring ways to get to Castro. Marita's was
the first assassination attempt on Castro's life and is the
closest anyone has managed to get to him. Since then,

(45:35):
There's been an estimated six hundred and thirty eight plots
to kill Castro, ranging from an all out invasion to
exploding cigars, poisoned pens, and sniper attacks or have failed,
and Castro, who steps down in two thousand and eight,
is one of the longest serving heads of state in
the world, is still alive today.

Speaker 8 (45:56):
He's survived quite a few assassination attempts. Only a few
of them were sponsored by the American government. Many others
were sponsored by Cuban exiles who were violently opposed to
the Castro government. Fidell survived because he created a very
powerful and thoroughly ruthless machine for internal security. He was

(46:16):
absolutely ruthless whenever he even had a scent of opposition,
whether it was a group of Cubans somewhere on the
island or some prominent individual in the Cuban leadership, even
a hint of opposition was enough to result in that
person's political extermination and possibly even their execution.

Speaker 1 (46:37):
The year after Frank Sturges gave Marita the poison pills,
he helped plan the CIA funded Bay of Pigs invasion
of Cuba to overthrow the Castro government. He was later
arrested as one of the Watergate burglars sent by President
Richard Nixon to break into the Democratic National headquarters in Washington.

(47:00):
Sturgis was imprisoned for thirteen months. As for Marita, she
continued to work against the Castro government and during a
fund raising mission, met another dictator, former president of Venezuela
Marcos Perez Jimenez. Marita fell in love with Perez. They

(47:21):
had a daughter and a brief affair, and then he
was imprisoned on charges of embezzling two hundred million dollars.
In two thousand, Marita returned to Havana in the hope
of meeting with Fidel Castro again, but he refused to
see her. Today, she is still living in New York.

(47:47):
Iran nineteen seventy nine, the worst hostage crisis in American
history begins. Unknown to the world at the time, US
embassy staff escape their way to the house of Canadian diplomats,
where they spent eighty five days in hiding.

Speaker 11 (48:06):
The longer that we were in hiding, the more the
potential was that we would be found.

Speaker 1 (48:13):
When the Central Intelligence Agency learn of the Americans on
the run, they assigned one of their top escape agents,
Tony Mendez, to get them out. He comes up with
an extraordinary plan to walk the diplomats out of Iran
in broad daylight, posing as a Hollywood film crew.

Speaker 12 (48:31):
It was a perfect example of truth being exchanged and
in fiction.

Speaker 1 (48:36):
The CIA now pushes its tradecraft to the limit as
they set out to disguise and train six ordinary Americans
in the Art of Escape. This is the real life
story of what would later become an Oscar winning Hollywood sensation.
But what isn't in the Hollywood version are the extraordinary
details of an operation the CIA kept hidden away and

(48:59):
classify files until now.

Speaker 13 (49:03):
It's the secret story of how the CIA fooled everyone.

Speaker 1 (49:31):
In late nineteen seventy nine, thousands of anti American protesters
in Iran are gathering outside the US embassy. Demonstrations against
America are common. Iran is still in the throes of
an Islamic revolution, and America is being accused of aiding
and abetting the hated exiled dictator, the Shah Razor pa Lavia.

(49:57):
This is one of hundreds of protests organized by militant
revolutionary students, but this time it's different.

Speaker 12 (50:07):
A few of them had makeshift weapons, you know, bike
chains or a baseball bat, though some of them did
have pistols. Massive crowd a thousand people roaring down with
America Death to Carter.

Speaker 1 (50:26):
Inside the embassy staff can see the disturbance from the
office windows. Shortly after nine am, the chains of the
gate are cut. A small breakaway group of student militants
heads for the main embassy building, the Chancery.

Speaker 12 (50:49):
They broke the window and they were able to enter
into the basement. The Iranians made their way up to
the second floor. I captured some Americans and said let
us end otherwise, you know, we'll we'll harm these people.

Speaker 1 (51:07):
Adjacent to the Chancery is another building, the consulate. Inside
there are more Americans. One of them is Mark Elijak.

Speaker 14 (51:24):
We started hearing kind of a hubbub coming from the
waiting area, people talking about demonstrators roaming inside the compound.

Speaker 1 (51:35):
Mark Lijak's wife, Cora, is also in the consulate.

Speaker 11 (51:39):
We did hear footsteps on the roof and we thought
that maybe somebody was going to try to get in
and find access into the building. So that was a
bit scary.

Speaker 6 (51:50):
Well, the lights put on. Apparently the demonstrators had gotten
into the power station and cut off the poor.

Speaker 14 (52:00):
Someone through a brick or a rack through the window,
and the marine went running in and saw a guy
climbing up the ladder.

Speaker 1 (52:13):
The diplomats now realize that the embassy compound is completely
overrun by demonstrators. At first, one of the US marines
guarding the consulate advises them to stay inside the building,
they hear on the radio that armed militants are trying
to kidnap the rest of the Americans. They now know

(52:35):
that they're in graved danger. They must escape fast.

Speaker 12 (52:40):
They realized that the Chancellery had been broken into and
that they really couldn't hold out any longer.

Speaker 1 (52:50):
They're advised to head to the nearby British embassy with
the help of a local Iranian guide. So they make
their way to a side door of the consulate that
leads directly onto the streets of Tehran. Only steps away
are thousands and thousands of angry Iranian protesters. Among the

(53:18):
first out a Mark and kor Elijac.

Speaker 14 (53:21):
When I first left the embassy, I was certainly nervous.
I felt very conspicuous.

Speaker 11 (53:28):
We were trying not to stand out. We were trying
to blend in with the people that were walking away.

Speaker 14 (53:37):
Step by step, and I'm trying to get away.

Speaker 1 (53:44):
They are followed by Joe Stafford, his wife Kathy, and
Bob Anders. The five avoid the angry crowds now behind
them and heads southward towards the British Embassy, led by
their Iranian guide.

Speaker 11 (54:06):
She pulled me to the side and the rest of
our group. Bossel went to the side and she says,
you know, there's a demonstration. We can't go there.

Speaker 6 (54:15):
Who's at the demonstration there? So we decided I'm plar
a good idea.

Speaker 1 (54:21):
In the end, they head to Bob Ander's apartment and
remain there, terrified of stepping back onto the streets of Terrana.
In Washington, while the embassy crisis is unfolding, it's still

(54:43):
the early hours of Sunday morning, calls from Iran begin
to trickle into the State Department. The President is alerted
as dawn rises, and so is the Central Intelligence Agency.

Speaker 13 (55:01):
Upon receiving the information that the embassy had been overrun,
the CIA would have immediately been concerned for the safety
of its people.

Speaker 1 (55:13):
By the time America wakes up, the revolutionary students have
declared a victory day. One of the world's biggest ever
international hostage crisis has begun.

Speaker 12 (55:29):
They were paraded in front of the cameras and this
was a big victory for the students. I mean, they
were a very surprised that they'd actually been able to
pull it off.

Speaker 1 (55:40):
Sixty six Americans are now being held hostage at gunpoint.
At this stage, the CIA have no idea that there's
a group of diplomats on the run.

Speaker 6 (56:00):
We feel very dangerous, a very dangerous situation.

Speaker 1 (56:06):
What happens next is not portrayed in the Hollywood movie.
After their first night in hiding, the escapees make a
nail biting series of overnight stays at five different locations
in Tehran. This includes the British Ambassador's residence. This takes

(56:29):
place of a six grueling days.

Speaker 12 (56:33):
They're literally going from house to house to house.

Speaker 11 (56:36):
A most terrifying time was it was either Wednesday or
Thursday night.

Speaker 15 (56:42):
All night long.

Speaker 11 (56:42):
The local watchman kept blowing a whistle about every ten
or fifteen minutes. Our nerves were raw.

Speaker 14 (56:54):
The six days that we spent on our own was
the scariest time. The Iranians were people up because the
other Americans that we've been in touch with in the
first days who were still out were gradually being arrested.

Speaker 1 (57:11):
Sees desperate and with no idea what to do. Bob
Anders remembers a friend in the Canadian embassy and gives
him a call. His name is John sheer Down.

Speaker 14 (57:24):
Bob said, why I'm not alone. There's five of us,
and John said, bring them off.

Speaker 1 (57:37):
Six days after they first step out of the US
Embassy onto the streets of Tehran. The escapees finally reached
the Canadian house, with their fellow Americans held hostage at gunpoint.
They themselves are now effectively fugitives at large in Iran,
terrified of being caught, confused about what to do next,

(58:01):
and exhausted, they now have just one hope rescue by
the CIA.

Speaker 14 (58:11):
I had the sense any way that Washington had sort
of forgotten about US.

Speaker 1 (58:18):
One month after the embassy takeover and the State Department
is still consumed by the ever worsening hostage crisis the
American hostages.

Speaker 4 (58:26):
No act has so galvanized the American public toward unity
in the last decade, as has a holding of our
people as hostages in Tehran.

Speaker 1 (58:37):
While State Department's staff grapple with how to deal with
the embassy, they also become aware of the six escapees
through information sent from Canadian officials in Tehran. The State
Department turns to the CIA. In early December, a series

(58:59):
of time top secret flash cables arrive on the desk
of an intelligence officer called Tony Mendes. Flash cables are
the highest priority communications, usually restricted to wars or the
most urgent of information.

Speaker 12 (59:15):
Tony saw these cables on his desk, and at the
top of them were these marked flash but you.

Speaker 9 (59:19):
Almost never see.

Speaker 12 (59:21):
In fact, some communicators, he told me, can go the
whole careers without ever seeing one.

Speaker 1 (59:26):
The flash cables are about the escaped diplomats on.

Speaker 13 (59:30):
December tenth, when Tony heard that there were six Americans
stranded outside the embassy, immediately his mind would have kicked
into gear.

Speaker 1 (59:41):
Tony Mendez is a rising star within the CIA. He's
carried out numerous undercover rescue operations, which the agency called exfiltrations,
or extracting assets out of dangerous places.

Speaker 12 (59:59):
His jaw was getting people out of tough spots, rescuing
people from dangerous areas.

Speaker 1 (01:00:08):
He's known as the Master of Disguise and works in
a highly secretive specialist department known as OTS.

Speaker 13 (01:00:17):
OTS is the Office of Technical Service, and they are
the CIA's gadget makers.

Speaker 12 (01:00:26):
These are the people in the film James Bond, which
would be the Q you know. These are they give
the equipment.

Speaker 1 (01:00:33):
With the arrival of the flash cables, Mendes and the
OTS are about to receive that biggest challenge yet. Mendes
is called to a meeting at the State Department.

Speaker 12 (01:00:53):
They discuss what they thought they should do to help
rescue these people. Tony immediately sort of let them know
that they should let him and the experts of the
CIA worry about this, and they did.

Speaker 1 (01:01:16):
The rescue is now in mend as his hands. Along
with his team of specialists at OTS, he sets to
work on a plan that will get them out in
broad daylight. The first problem, the escapees are American, and
the Iranian authorities will be on the lookout for any

(01:01:36):
Americans trying to leave the country.

Speaker 13 (01:01:39):
The US is the hated enemy.

Speaker 1 (01:01:42):
The second problem is that the diplomats are untrained in
spy tradecraft. They simply won't have the ability of accomplished
agents to suddenly adopt an alien identity.

Speaker 13 (01:01:55):
They were completely unwitting of this black world in which
people can be exfiltrated.

Speaker 1 (01:02:01):
So Mendes wants to find them applausible reason to be
in Iran, which will fool the Iranians, and one which
any ordinary English speaking American can fake.

Speaker 13 (01:02:12):
The key is, if they spoke English, what other possible
country wasn't Iran mad At The answer, of course, is Canada.

Speaker 1 (01:02:28):
Mendes has a hunch that Canada offers the diplomats their
best chance, but he's worried that the Canadian government won't
break its own protocol and issue citizens from another country
fake passports.

Speaker 12 (01:02:43):
Unfortunately, the Canadians had a law that said, you know,
you can't just give out passports to anybody. But the
Foreign Minister along with the Prime Minister got together and
they were able to sort of circumvent the parliament so
that they could pass this exception to their laws.

Speaker 1 (01:02:59):
With the Canadian passports secured, next, Menders now needs a
cover story.

Speaker 12 (01:03:04):
He wanted to create a story that was so unbelievable,
so crazy and over the top, that no one would
believe that it was fake.

Speaker 1 (01:03:21):
After endless days and nights searching for the perfect cover story,
Mendes hits on an idea. Suppose the diplomats are Canadians
who are part of a Hollywood film crew, and their
cover story is that they're on a special trip to
look at filming locations. Despite the revolution, the cultural sector

(01:03:43):
of the new Iranian government still wants to attract foreign currency,
and that includes film investment.

Speaker 13 (01:03:51):
The plan is implausible, it's improbable that it would work.
It is fraught with problems and a thousand things could
go wrong.

Speaker 1 (01:04:03):
Not the least of the problems is that Mendez knows
little about Hollywood film crews, so he calls up an
old friend in California, John Chambers, an Oscar winning makeup
artist famous for his effects on Planet of the Apes.

Speaker 12 (01:04:17):
So he called his friend John Chambers to find out
if it would be feasible and what kind of people
would go on a location scouting party. And after Chambers
ticked off the various jobs that a person would have,
Tony realized that it was a perfect solution.

Speaker 1 (01:04:41):
Back in Iran, the escapees of following developments in the
ongoing hostage crisis of the US embassy.

Speaker 14 (01:04:47):
We had an on television, so we did see some
footage of the hostages blindfolded and being led around.

Speaker 11 (01:04:58):
You know, they're completely helpless at the of this crowd
of people around them pushing them out, and that was
pretty scary.

Speaker 1 (01:05:05):
The diplomats have been joined by one more, Lee Shatz,
another American working at the embassy, whose escape had been
engineered by the Swedes. The six are now known as
the house Guests. After living with the Canadians for what,
by Christmas is now well over forty days.

Speaker 11 (01:05:24):
See longer that we were in hiding, the more the
potential was that we would be found.

Speaker 1 (01:05:31):
Day by day, the danger for the HouseGuests is increasing.
Odds are that sooner or later the diplomats will be
discovered and turned over to the authorities. It's now a
race against time. In early January, Mendez goes to Los

(01:05:56):
Angeles on a four day trip to execute the first
stage of his allilaborate Hollywood ruse by visiting his old
friend John Chambers. Within ten thousand dollars of CIA cash
hidden in a secret compartment of his briefcase.

Speaker 16 (01:06:11):
Tony had to come out to Los Angeles to try
to put this plan in a motion. Goes to John
chambers house and they sit down.

Speaker 1 (01:06:20):
Mendes turns to Chambers and a colleague of his, Bob's side,
down to help him build up what will look like
a genuine Hollywood production from scratch.

Speaker 16 (01:06:30):
Bob was really surprised when he shows up at John
Chambers house and they're sitting in the breakfast nook, and
then here's a CIA officer saying, we have to rescue
some Americans who are stuck on the lamb in Tehran.
You know, like that was not what he expected that morning.

Speaker 1 (01:06:47):
The three work fast and quickly find the script of
an unmade film called Lord of Light.

Speaker 12 (01:06:53):
Tony says, this is exactly what we need. It kind
of has a Middle Eastern field to it, so he says,
let's call it Argo. And they realized that it also
has a kind of mythical connotation Jason and the Argonauts.
It's the ship that the Argonaut sailed on, and Tony says,
this is perfect.

Speaker 1 (01:07:12):
With the script problem solved, next, they need a Hollywood office.

Speaker 16 (01:07:18):
We're just coming up here on Sunset Gower Studios. This
is the lot that used to be the Columbia lot actually,
and this is where Tony and John Chambers and bobside
took over an office that had just been occupied by
Michael Dolis for the China Syndrome and it was empty,
so that's where they set up their fake film production.

Speaker 1 (01:07:38):
Mendes names the production company Studio six, after the six
diplomats he must rescue. Chambers and Sidell agree to run
it on behalf of the CIA. While in California, Mendez
also turns his attention to the minutia of the operation,

(01:07:58):
collecting what the cill pocket litter. Pocket Litter refers to
all the tiny details which the authorities might check during
the escape.

Speaker 13 (01:08:09):
Tony would have had to consider every possibility. Everything from
the labels on their clothing down to matchbooks that came
from Ottawa are bits that would be associated either with
the movie industry or with Canada. Everything had to support
the central cover.

Speaker 1 (01:08:30):
Preparations for the exfiltration do not stop here. When Mendes
gets back to OTS offices, he draws on his huge
team of CIA technical specialists to work on the details.

Speaker 13 (01:08:44):
He was supported by literally hundreds of people. He had
disguised specialists, he had graphics people, he had document validators
how to talk about forgery. He had individuals that could
talk about clothing. What would a Canadian film crew wise?

Speaker 1 (01:09:10):
Back in Iran, the HouseGuests have now been in hiding,
not for days, but months. The endless waiting has begun
to unnerve them, and by this stage any small incident
is enough to cause huge alarm.

Speaker 14 (01:09:25):
We had one incident where a helicopter flew low, very
low over the house.

Speaker 13 (01:09:35):
It scared us.

Speaker 14 (01:09:37):
We were tense, even though we were in a safe place.
It didn't take much to trigger this sort of flight
response or panic. Whatever you want to call.

Speaker 1 (01:09:49):
It fear, paranoia, and frustration. The combined effect begins to
wear down the mental state of the trapped diplomats. Their
worries are well founded. Inside the US embassy, the hostages

(01:10:10):
are being mistreated, even being subjected to terrifying mock executions.
Despite the pressure, the house guests do whatever they can
just to get through the endless weeks in hiding. This
is helped by the Canadian hosts.

Speaker 11 (01:10:30):
The Shia downs the atmosphere that was created by the
Sheardowns through the family kind of setup that we had,
the social events that they did for us, I think
they helped us as much as possible have a normal life.

Speaker 14 (01:10:45):
I think Gianet realized that in order to keep us
mentally healthy, you might say that there were certain things
that they could do. One of them was the routine
that we had with the formal dinner and and the
conversation following. Another was they would have parties for us

(01:11:05):
a couple times a month. They would invite people from
other embassies, such as the New Zealanders and the Danish ambassador,
people who knew about us, so that we could have
normal social interaction with people outside of our very limited circle.

Speaker 1 (01:11:23):
Some of Their most memorable occasions include both the Thanksgiving
and a Christmas feast enjoyed in the sumptuous setting of
John Sheardown's diplomatic house.

Speaker 9 (01:11:34):
Due to a strange fluke.

Speaker 12 (01:11:37):
The Shootdowns had stocked their basement with alcohol because they
were next in line to host one of these embassy
functions that the foreign diplomats would have. Obviously it didn't
happen because of the embassy takeover that sort of shut
all that stuff down. But the house guests had this
abundant supply of wine and liquor and these kinds of things,

(01:11:58):
so they often through themselves little parties and they drank.
But there was also a lot of tension, and it
was there were some tense moments when they were worried
about being discovered.

Speaker 14 (01:12:12):
I felt like we were on the Titanic and that
we didn't know when we were going to hit the iceberg.
But unlike the people in the real Titanic, we knew
that there were icebergs out there and that it was
potentially possible that any day we could run into one.

Speaker 1 (01:12:30):
Unable to leave a house and living behind closed doors,
the diplomats pass endless hours in whatever way they can
it's just a waiting game.

Speaker 6 (01:12:42):
John Sheardown had a big library. We did a lot
of reading. I read twenty seven books in that time.
I think Mark Mark Landrik more than double that. We
played monopolies grabble Bridge. You know, there's always a worry
the bucket and Lion, you know that we might be caught.

Speaker 9 (01:13:03):
They became a bit so crazy. They had to stay inside.

Speaker 12 (01:13:06):
There were times when they visitors would come over to
the house, they would lock themselves in their room.

Speaker 17 (01:13:11):
They would hide under the bed.

Speaker 12 (01:13:12):
They were very nervous about making it an towards sound,
anything that could attract attention.

Speaker 1 (01:13:22):
In Washington. The CIA also feel the pressure. Mendes sets
a date for the exfiltration January twenty fifth, nineteen eighty.
The risks are so great that rather than send another agent,
he'll go there himself. He selects a colleague code named Julia,
who speaks Farsi, the language of Iran, to travel with him.

(01:13:46):
The CIA are also in contact with the Canadian ambassador,
Kenneth Taylor, who has been protecting the HouseGuests since the start.
Soon Mendes will meet them all face to face, and
their freedom will part from the hands of the Canadians
to those of the CIA agents. If it all goes

(01:14:07):
wrong and fails, then ultimately their own lives could also
be on the line. Almost three months since the first
day of the diplomat's escape, top intelligence agent Tony Mendez
and a colleague code named Julio arrived in Iran. Most

(01:14:28):
of this time, the Canadian ambassador has been in secret
communication with the CIA and knows they're coming. When they
arrived at the Canadian diplomat's house, the house guests have
no idea what to expect.

Speaker 14 (01:14:46):
Two gentlemen in trench codes showed up, which was appropriate,
of course. Tony introduced himself as Kevin Harkins. There was
another gentleman with him, but he stayed in the background
pretty much.

Speaker 1 (01:15:07):
The man who calls himself Kevin Harkins. In fact, Tony
Mendez immediately begins to assess the diplomat's mental state after
eighty days in hiding.

Speaker 13 (01:15:19):
When Tony joined the group, he selectively and very carefully
begin to analyze each one of them, saying, who is
the individual that I least need to worry about and
who do I need to focus on.

Speaker 1 (01:15:35):
Mendes is looking out for the weakest link the person
most likely to panic during the escape. The HouseGuests are
also making an assessment of their own Can this man
really get them out of here? And how.

Speaker 11 (01:15:57):
When Tony offered the Hollywood scenario, I liked it immediately.

Speaker 6 (01:16:02):
They shut up an office in Hollywood, and everyone had
a business character, and here's mine right here.

Speaker 1 (01:16:12):
The argo plan impresses most of the house guests, but
not all of them are immediately convinced.

Speaker 14 (01:16:19):
I got admit I was taken aback by it because
it's not something I'd been thinking about for the last
three months.

Speaker 1 (01:16:28):
The challenge for Mendes is to open the diplomat's eyes
to an entirely new, illusionary world of falsity and pretense.
They must somehow come to terms with playing Hollywood characters
that don't exist except in the eyes of the Iranians.
So Mendes plays a small conjurious trick on them to

(01:16:49):
get them thinking about the deception they'll have to perform
themselves to escape.

Speaker 12 (01:16:55):
So he comes in and he performs this little parlor
trick that he does with two quarks, holds him in
his hand kind of forming two d's, and he magically
separates them, making it look as if one cork has
passed or the other.

Speaker 11 (01:17:08):
And I know it was just a trick, it was
just a sleight of hand, but somehow I was kind
of amazed by the little Handrick. Well he could do this,
you know, And he's saying he's got all this experience,
so I think that we can trust him.

Speaker 6 (01:17:21):
I think he said, there's the point of it. It's
the whole thing is allusion to try to put something
old on somebody. You're playing a role. You're a different person,
so you're trying to fool somebody, So it's it's it's
it's not real and it's an illusion.

Speaker 1 (01:17:40):
These are the very first moments that the Master of
Disguise has with the HouseGuests, just the beginning of the preparations.
He knows the Hollywood plan is a big ask for
civilians not used to undercover operations. Even so Mendez issues

(01:18:02):
them with their aliases, the people they're going to have
to pretend to be. On the day of the escape,
Coral Elijac is told that she is no longer Mark
Elijac's wife, but the Hollywood scriptwriter Teresa Harris.

Speaker 11 (01:18:17):
Someone had obviously read our files. Because my birthday was
my mother's month and day, and it was my year,
so it was things that I already knew. And I
actually went to school with a woman named Teresa Harris
who shares my actual real birthday. I don't know if
that's a fluke.

Speaker 1 (01:18:41):
The next day, CIA agents Tony Mendez and Julio tried
through Tehran to the Canadian embassy. Here they have to
perform a critical piece of CIA tradecraft, forging the travel
documents of the six escapees, watched by the Canadian imambassador
Kenneth Taylor. Mendes forges the travel documents. He needs to

(01:19:08):
create a record of these fuse identities having entered.

Speaker 13 (01:19:11):
Iran, and he'd have had a number of tools. He
would have had, of course, a magnifying class. He would
have had a forger's kit, and he would have used
what's called the forger's bridge, which is a way to
rest his hands on the document that don't smear the ink,

(01:19:33):
but allow him to put in the final details. If
they look too perfect, there's something wrong with them. But
if they're too haphazard, they may not be believable.

Speaker 1 (01:19:46):
To match the ink used by the Iranian authorities. Mendes
uses an ink pad supplied by the CIA but it
has dried up and doesn't work.

Speaker 12 (01:19:56):
Now Here is where the artistic side of Tony comes in.
He walks over to Ken Taylor's liquor cabin. He selects
a scotch with a high octane quality. He pours some
scotch onto the pad and sure enough, they come out perfectly.

Speaker 1 (01:20:19):
It's the final day of the escape preparations. Tomorrow they
will head to Tehran's airport and try to flee the country,
but Mendes and Julio are not sure that the HouseGuests
are adequately prepared.

Speaker 12 (01:20:35):
So on Sunday night, Tony goes back to the shutdowns
to meet up with the house guests, and he's very
surprised by what he sees.

Speaker 1 (01:20:44):
What he sees is that the HouseGuests are scrambling through
all their clothes, completely absorbed in the characters they will play.
They have to transform themselves from bureaucrats into fashionable Hollywood filmmakers.

Speaker 14 (01:21:00):
Bob Andrews I think won the prize, though I mean
he decided to become very flamboyant. I think he unbuttoned
his shirt down to about the middle of his chest.
Bob has quite a bit of a chest. Sorry, Despite that, prominently.

Speaker 6 (01:21:21):
I'm looking out of my shirt, you know, and I thought, well,
maybe I have some kind of a chain, you know,
with the medallion. They're something that would that would fit.
You'd be sort of Hollywood issue. So then I said, yeah,
that's that's the me. That's the new me, you know.
That's that's Robert Baker that works for Studio six.

Speaker 1 (01:21:46):
The house guests begin to enjoy playing their flamboyant Hollywood characters,
but Mondays is still concerned that they haven't yet taken
on board the full gravity of the escape. So with
the help of Roger Lucy, a colleague of the Ambassador,
he decides to put them through a mock interrogation.

Speaker 9 (01:22:09):
And he took it very seriously.

Speaker 12 (01:22:10):
He actually wore these other boots, he had a camouflaged jacket,
a little swagger stick.

Speaker 9 (01:22:17):
He got right in their faces.

Speaker 10 (01:22:20):
M hm.

Speaker 6 (01:22:23):
Roger, he was playing his role as the interrogator. He
was playing it to the hill.

Speaker 1 (01:22:27):
So he gave.

Speaker 6 (01:22:30):
Him some kind of a very serious threat. I forget
exactly what it was, but something like it. He was
going to be taken away and probably executed. And then
this gave us a little start, and I said, well, yeah,
this have to take those things seriously and it's not
just a game that's that's playing.

Speaker 14 (01:22:56):
I think that the point was to make sure that
we had those hands is down so fast that we
could spit them out and not give us time to
think to remember. They had to be right there and
we had to be able to recall them immediately, and
it was effective.

Speaker 3 (01:23:14):
I think.

Speaker 1 (01:23:20):
After only two days of preparation, Mendez decides the time
has come for the diplomats to make a break for it.
If he's right, it could be their ticket out. But
if he's wrong, their freedom, even their lives, could be
on the line. The day of reckoning has arrived. Once

(01:23:45):
the group enters the airport, there will be no turning back.

Speaker 9 (01:23:50):
This was the moment of truth.

Speaker 5 (01:23:53):
He knew that this was life of death.

Speaker 1 (01:24:06):
As day breaks, Mendez enters the airport, soon to be
followed by the six diplomats.

Speaker 14 (01:24:17):
The initial shark of entering a brightly lit, crowded place
after being and hiding for three months, definitely something to
deal with.

Speaker 1 (01:24:33):
After checking in their bags, they faced their first big test,
getting through passport control. But right from the start it
looks like it could go wrong. Lee shafts breaks away
from the house guests and their agreed plan.

Speaker 12 (01:24:52):
Eli was sort of standing there a little nervous. He
was beginning to look around, you know, a little worried.

Speaker 1 (01:25:01):
The customs official looks at Lee Shat's his passport photo,
notices his mustache and thinks maybe it's a different person.

Speaker 12 (01:25:14):
Immigration's officer looked at him, looked at his photo, did
a double take, and then he took his passport and
left and went into a background.

Speaker 1 (01:25:35):
Mendez can only watch from a distance, hoping Shats won't panic.

Speaker 13 (01:25:42):
Tony's greatest fear was that they would panic, They would
break cover, they would confess, refuse to go through the
screening process, and literally be frozen by fear. And at
this point, even a tiny bead of running off their
forehead could betray the fact that these passports weren't legitimate.

Speaker 1 (01:26:10):
When the official comes back, Shatz tries to explain that
he's trimmed his mustache and it really is him in
the photograph, and.

Speaker 12 (01:26:21):
He basically told the guy, I trim my mustach. Then
he stamped the passport and he let him go.

Speaker 1 (01:26:32):
After Lee Shat's, the rest of the house guests file
through passport control, but the team are not yet through ahead,
they still face the riskiest part of the escape, presenting
their departure forms at final immigration.

Speaker 13 (01:26:49):
All of this work came up to the point is
could the departure forms that they were carried. Would they
be matched to the original.

Speaker 1 (01:27:01):
White forms in theory filled in on entry to a run,
but which the escapees don't have, must match the yellow
exit films Mendes has forged. If the officials try to
cross check the forms against each other, it will all
go wrong. It's a chance Mendes has to take.

Speaker 13 (01:27:23):
If any one of the six had failed, they would
not only get been arrested, but Tomy likely would have
been shot.

Speaker 9 (01:27:31):
You feel very powerless.

Speaker 11 (01:27:33):
When we got to the immigration desk, there was no
one there.

Speaker 14 (01:27:39):
Korra went kind of in the back there and started yelling,
and nobody came. So she yelled again, and this sleepy
looking guy came out carrying a teapot, and he put
the teapot down and he grabbed our passports, pulled the
cards out, handed them back to us. Didn't even look

(01:28:03):
at us at all at any point in this process.
And we thanked him, and then we headed off to
the departure lounge.

Speaker 1 (01:28:12):
All six escapees make it through the critical stage. The
official hardly looks at the yellow forms that Mendez has forged.
The house guests now assemble in the departure lounge waiting
for their flight call.

Speaker 4 (01:28:32):
Then bad news, we are sorry to employ you.

Speaker 17 (01:28:39):
That's with Their flight.

Speaker 4 (01:28:42):
Will be delayed due to mechanical problems.

Speaker 13 (01:28:47):
Something always happens unexpected, and in this instance it does.
The flight is delayed.

Speaker 1 (01:28:58):
The delay means that chances of being found out are
now increasing minute after minute. The elite Revolutionary guards who
Mendez hoped to avoid, are now coming on duty. They're
trained to be on the lookout for spies. The delay

(01:29:18):
means that the diplomats must maintain their disguises potentially for hours.

Speaker 14 (01:29:24):
You feel very powerless, and that makes the time drag
even longer.

Speaker 13 (01:29:29):
They don't know are the Revolutionary guard onto them, Are
they scrutinizing the papers? Are they going to be matching
the white and yellow copies?

Speaker 1 (01:29:40):
The worry for Mendes is how long can they maintain
their disguises before they give everything away? And can they
hold their nerve in front of the feared revolutionary guards.

Speaker 14 (01:29:57):
The longer we were there, the greater the chairs of
somebody recognizing any one of us.

Speaker 1 (01:30:08):
The delayed flight has left the escapees exposed. Kathy Joe
and Cora Elijak have more reason to be worried than
the others because they work in the visa section of
the consulate, dealing with Iranians every day. Their faces are familiar.
They could be spotted at any time.

Speaker 11 (01:30:27):
Kathy, Joe and I had all worked on the visa line.
I was worried that just by coincidence, somebody in the
airport would recognize Kathy Joe or myself. I don't think
we were talking very much. We'd kind of gun quiet.
We've done everything we could. We just wanted to get
out of that room and onto the airplane.

Speaker 1 (01:30:50):
The presence of the Revolutionary Guards who are now coming
on duty ramps up the pressure to another level.

Speaker 12 (01:30:58):
The de partial isselfs feel that as the day is progressing,
more and more Revolutionary guards are coming in. They're beginning
to harass the people.

Speaker 1 (01:31:08):
As they wait. Mendez sees that the Revolutionary guards are
stopping other passengers and questioning them.

Speaker 12 (01:31:15):
They're looking for Iranians who are trying to steal wealth
and leave the country, but they're starting to turn and
look at foreigners as well.

Speaker 1 (01:31:33):
After years of carrying out undercover exfiltrations, Mendes knows that
it's in these unexpected moments that the escapees are most
likely to panic. They have already begun to make their
first mistakes. For Mendes, this is nerve racking.

Speaker 11 (01:31:53):
One of the people in the group really didn't want
to leave. He felt we were abandoning the hostages. He
never really got into the story and the role, and
in fact, when we went to the waiting room, he
called me by my real name, Cora Mark, and I
moved away from that person and decided to kind of

(01:32:15):
keep a distance from them.

Speaker 1 (01:32:20):
Another mistake is when a nervous HouseGuest picks up an
Iranian newspaper written in the local language of Farsi. It
will be highly unlikely for a Hollywood filmmaker to be
doing this, exactly the kind of giveaway a trained revolutionary
guard would be looking for.

Speaker 11 (01:32:39):
Tony went over to him and said, you know, put
the paper down. You should probably not be a Farsie
speaker or be able to read it, and he did.
He put it down.

Speaker 1 (01:32:50):
Mendes cannot afford a third mistake, just one glance by
a revolutionary guard at the wrong moment and they all
go down.

Speaker 13 (01:33:04):
During the delay, Tony could do essentially one thing to
assuage the fears of the six and that's be calm.

Speaker 11 (01:33:15):
Those last thirty minutes in the waiting area seemed to
drag on forever, every minute, passing very very slowly.

Speaker 13 (01:33:27):
When they glanced over at him, they couldn't see panic.
They couldn't see fear, only the normal countenance, the rock,
the steadiness.

Speaker 6 (01:33:39):
If you could take your blood pressure at each different
point alot, the let it feed be pretty high.

Speaker 14 (01:33:45):
This was kind of a draining experience going through the
airport and I just wanted to be on the aircraft
at that stage.

Speaker 9 (01:33:54):
That was it.

Speaker 1 (01:33:58):
Finally, at around eight thirty am, there's a second announcement.

Speaker 8 (01:34:05):
Flight Bazieri, please appropriate the bording day.

Speaker 12 (01:34:12):
Finally they hear the announcement their.

Speaker 9 (01:34:14):
Flight is borning.

Speaker 6 (01:34:16):
We really felt good to actually getting out of the
plush to the plane that was beginning to feel over.
Maybe it's really gonna work, you know, it's really gonna happen.

Speaker 1 (01:34:30):
As they leave, there was no dramatic police chase along
the runway. Flight three six three takes off without further incident.
A few hours later, it lands in Zurich, Switzerland.

Speaker 11 (01:34:48):
I wanted to say thank you and goodbye to Tony,
but when I turned around, he was gone.

Speaker 14 (01:34:54):
I'm not even sure we had a chance to shake
hands with Tony and Julio. They went off and you know,
of them, it was just another day at the office,
I guess, but obviously for us it was a life
changing experience.

Speaker 13 (01:35:07):
Tony knows they're going on with their lives, but he
knows that this is just one of many operations, and
his primary objective at that point is drift off into
the shadows.

Speaker 1 (01:35:25):
The Argo escape plan is kept secret for seventeen years.
The files are eventually declassified, and the world would learn
of one of the CIA's most extraordinary operations.

Speaker 13 (01:35:40):
It's the secret story of how the CIA fooled everyone.

Speaker 12 (01:35:46):
Argo is a perfect example of truth being strange in fiction.
I mean, it's hard to imagine that this is real,
and I think that was the genius of Argo.

Speaker 1 (01:36:01):
Beirute nineteen eighty five.

Speaker 18 (01:36:05):
Pr apparently packed with explosives, blew up at the entrance
to the embassy.

Speaker 1 (01:36:09):
Terrorists are targeting Americans in a series of deadly attacks.
Hundreds are dead, and now the CIA's top man in
the Middle East has been taken hostage. William Casey, the
head of a CIA, decides to throw out the rule
book and strike back.

Speaker 5 (01:36:25):
He wanted to take revenge.

Speaker 19 (01:36:27):
It was totally in off the book's operation.

Speaker 1 (01:36:31):
In a top secret mission still denied by the American government,
Casey allegedly sanctions the assassination of the man he believes
is responsible for the attacks on Americans.

Speaker 20 (01:36:42):
Bill Casey was convinced that fad Laala was the forest
behind his follum.

Speaker 19 (01:36:47):
He determined this was a leading terrorist and they were
going to get him.

Speaker 1 (01:36:53):
And on March the eighth, nineteen eighty five, the assassins strike.

Speaker 19 (01:36:58):
If it was a car bomb, they took it into
Fadlawa's neighborhood, hoping to kill him.

Speaker 1 (01:37:04):
Based on briefings with the former head of the CIA,
this is the top secret story of the Beyroot car bomb.

(01:37:38):
Nineteen eighty three. Beirut, Lebanon, the capital of this tiny
Middle Eastern country, is being devastated by years of conflict.
Now American troops are arriving in the city, their mission

(01:37:58):
not to invade, but to bring peace. Also in the
city is a substantial CIA presence operating out of the
US Embassy. The agents are there to counter a growing
problem in Beirut terrorism. A top secret meeting has been

(01:38:23):
called to discuss the threat. Chairing the meeting will be
the CIA's top Middle East analyst, Robert Ames.

Speaker 15 (01:38:32):
He is a man who was considered to be the
key analyst of terrorist organizations in Middle East politics.

Speaker 21 (01:38:39):
Bob Ames was probably the most knowledgeable person in the
Middle East.

Speaker 1 (01:38:44):
Ains had previously infiltrated the PLO and has been brought
into Beyroot secretly to advise on the terrorist threat. Also
in the building that day is AID worker and Damn.

Speaker 21 (01:38:58):
When you work in an embassy, everyone knows that CIA
agents are there. What you may not know is.

Speaker 6 (01:39:05):
Who they are.

Speaker 1 (01:39:12):
As the classified CIA meeting is gathering, a white van
is winding through the Bayrout streets to the embassy.

Speaker 20 (01:39:20):
Very few people saw what was coming. It was the
calm before the storm.

Speaker 21 (01:39:29):
The funny thing about living in Beirut. When I was there,
I never dreamt that I would be targeted.

Speaker 7 (01:39:35):
It didn't look like a threat and kind of took
everybody off guard.

Speaker 1 (01:39:39):
The driver manages to enter the embassy compound's basement garage.
The entire central section of the embassy building collapses in
the explosion, down seven stories of masonry and rubber, and

(01:40:04):
Damar is one of those trapped beneath the wreckage.

Speaker 21 (01:40:09):
They couldn't move anything. I heard ya, labina, ya labina,
let's go, let's go, and I was aware that there
were four young Lebanes near me. They made like a
board and they moved me out and they started to
run with me across the garden.

Speaker 1 (01:40:27):
Anne's rescue is captured on video. She is one of
the lucky ones. Two hundred people are wounded in the attack.
Sixty three are killed, seventeen of them. American news of

(01:40:50):
the embassy bombing rocks America.

Speaker 17 (01:40:53):
Tobs even news dayan rather recording the US Embassy in
Beirut tonight is a floodbit scene of death and devastation.
Much of the seven story building is rubble, and in
that rubble possibly more victims of a massive terrorist car bomb.
The Pentagon says one US marine and two US Army soldiers.

Speaker 5 (01:41:11):
From a young marine.

Speaker 22 (01:41:12):
Then and I watched this on the news and my
thoughts were, wow, I'm on my way over there.

Speaker 10 (01:41:18):
The embassy being bombed was definitely a shock. I don't
think anybody had any idea the kind of defense an
embassy really needed against the kind of bombs that could
be put together, particularly when you have people willing to
die deliver them.

Speaker 18 (01:41:37):
This cowardly actors claimed the number of killed and wounded.
It appears that there are some American casualties, but we
don't know yet the exact number or the extent of injury.

Speaker 1 (01:41:47):
For the CIA, it is a particularly devastating blow. Half
the American dead worked for the agency.

Speaker 20 (01:41:56):
If you look at it from the bomber's point of view,
it was an enormous success. Wiped out the CIA station
killed Bob Ames.

Speaker 5 (01:42:03):
His loss was devastating.

Speaker 15 (01:42:05):
The director of the CIA said that Bob Ames was
as close to an irreplaceable man as he had ever
known in US intelligence.

Speaker 1 (01:42:17):
That director of the CIA is William Casey, and Casey
is taking it personally.

Speaker 4 (01:42:25):
Well.

Speaker 10 (01:42:25):
Casey obviously was a very intelligent guy. He was a
risk taker, and that's different from being a gambler.

Speaker 7 (01:42:33):
He was a very intimidating person if you were afraid
of him. He was at a very short temper. He
didn't suffer fools lightly.

Speaker 10 (01:42:41):
In many respects, he was a wild man. He had
really no time for the moderates, you know, to make
nice people.

Speaker 1 (01:42:55):
Casey directs every CIA resource available to hunt down those
responsible for the on the US Embassy.

Speaker 7 (01:43:02):
Under CIA Director Casey, the CICH probably more sophisticated than
it ever had been in its history.

Speaker 1 (01:43:10):
Analysts are charged with reviewing thousands of intersects, agents are
ordered to go to their informants, and dozens of emergency
meetings are called for senior CIA officials. But before Casey
can get the enemy in his sights, they strike again

(01:43:35):
their target. Over eighteen hundred American Marines stationed in Lebanon
as peacekeepers.

Speaker 15 (01:43:43):
The United States had made a decision to put its
troops in Lebanon to help stabilize that country.

Speaker 22 (01:43:50):
We were there acting as a liaison between the Lebanese
government and the war and militias until the Lebanese could
get on their feet.

Speaker 5 (01:44:00):
They weren't sent there to fight a ward. They were
to keep the peace. It was a peace keeping mission.

Speaker 1 (01:44:06):
The majority of the forces are based in barracks situated
next to Bay Route Airport.

Speaker 22 (01:44:11):
From the rooftop of the building we could see the
main terminal and the mountains and the Mediterranean Sea to
the right.

Speaker 1 (01:44:18):
Their position is also dangerously close to an area of
Bay Route controlled by Muslim militias.

Speaker 10 (01:44:26):
Where it was located was not a choice position for
its security.

Speaker 1 (01:44:35):
In the early hours, the truck heads out of Muslim
controlled Bay Route on the airport road towards the barracks.
At the same time, Marine Lance Corporal Kevin Jiggitts is
signing off from guard duty.

Speaker 22 (01:44:49):
I went down to my room in the building and
I remember just taking off my boot and laying down.

Speaker 1 (01:45:00):
As Jiggets lies down to sleep, the van approaches the
perimeter of the barracks.

Speaker 22 (01:45:05):
This truck came down airport Road, he turned into the
parking lot of the main terminal and he crashed through
a barbed wire barrier.

Speaker 1 (01:45:17):
As a peacekeeping force, the Marines weapons are not loaded.
The face of the driver is visible to the guards
as he aims the truck of the barracks. He is smiling.

Speaker 20 (01:45:28):
It drove into this big building. It was a barracks.

Speaker 22 (01:45:32):
The initial contact with the truck and the guard shack
is what whoked me up.

Speaker 1 (01:45:39):
The truck rams into the base of the barracks and
is primed to explode.

Speaker 22 (01:45:43):
And I reached for my weapon when I said to showtime, ladies,
And that's The last thing I remember.

Speaker 1 (01:45:59):
It is the largest non nuclear explosion since the Second
World War.

Speaker 22 (01:46:04):
Upon detonation, the building was lifted from its foundation and
kind of pancake down floor after floor.

Speaker 1 (01:46:12):
The entire building is leveled.

Speaker 5 (01:46:15):
We'd never seen anything like this. It was an iconic bombing.

Speaker 22 (01:46:18):
The truck was laden with approximately twelve pounds of explosives.

Speaker 10 (01:46:23):
It was a pretty simple thing. A very large vehicle
packed with explosives got up to the front of the
barracks and was exploded, And it wasn't very complicated.

Speaker 5 (01:46:35):
It was a beautifully done operation.

Speaker 22 (01:46:41):
The next thing I remember was two white marines were
removing rubble from me. I didn't feel any pain until
they picked me up.

Speaker 1 (01:46:52):
Both of Jickett's legs are broken and he suffers burns
and cuts over his entire body. All that remains of
the Night Story building is rougher.

Speaker 22 (01:47:03):
Prior to ninety eleven, it was the largest terrorist attack
against US personnel in the history of the United States.

Speaker 20 (01:47:13):
Two hundred and forty one American soldiers were killed, two
hundred and forty of them more marines.

Speaker 1 (01:47:19):
It is the biggest single loss of American serviceman's life
since Iwajima.

Speaker 18 (01:47:25):
I know there are no words that can express our
shorrow and grief or the loss of those splendid young men. Likewise,
there are no words to properly express our outrage and
I think the outrage of all Americans at the despicable.

Speaker 1 (01:47:43):
Act in Washington. William Casey and the CIA are now
in a real pressure to find the terrorists. The problem
is is that no has yet claimed responsibility. But within

(01:48:04):
hours of the attack, a statement is released to a
French news agency by a group calling themselves Islamic Jihad
Arabic for Holy War. The groups say they are responsible
for both the attack on the Marines and for another

(01:48:24):
simultaneous attack in the city which has claimed the lives
of fifty eight French soldiers. But no one in Washington
has ever heard of Islamic Jahad.

Speaker 20 (01:48:37):
When the Islamic Jihad claimed the bombing, we knew absolutely
nothing about it. It was not an organization that we
even knew existed.

Speaker 9 (01:48:46):
The CIA was caught completely off guard.

Speaker 7 (01:48:48):
We did not have the structure internally to handle that
kind of threat.

Speaker 5 (01:48:52):
We didn't know where it was, what it was, we
didn't know who was behind it.

Speaker 1 (01:48:58):
William Casey is determined that the CIA will find out
and bring the perpetrators of this terrible crime to justice,
and according to some, he will go beyond the law
to do so. The man Casey selects to uncover those
responsible is seasoned Middle East agent Robert Bayer, anxious not

(01:49:23):
to lose more operatives. BEA's brief is simple.

Speaker 20 (01:49:27):
When I left Washington and the orders were stay alive.
Whatever you do, stay alive. We don't care if you
ever send a report in. We don't care what you do.
Just don't get killed or kidnapped. There was very simple orders.

Speaker 1 (01:49:42):
Bea sets off and finds be route a city in turmoil.

Speaker 20 (01:49:46):
There is no other way in except a black Hawk helicopter.
We came in over the sea about ten feet the
helicopter drop down so that they're spray going everywhere, and
you're coming in about two hundred miles an hour.

Speaker 5 (01:50:09):
There's shelling, parts of beyrout burning.

Speaker 20 (01:50:13):
It was the ninth circle of Hella.

Speaker 1 (01:50:22):
And the other agents immediately begin to set up a
low profile operation.

Speaker 5 (01:50:27):
This was Lebanon, you know, it was a civil war.

Speaker 20 (01:50:30):
You just absolutely wanted to be the least important person
on the street.

Speaker 5 (01:50:36):
We didn't wear.

Speaker 20 (01:50:36):
Suits, always Levi's scuff shoes, You never carried a radio
in the open, You never carried a gun in the open.
You look like you were a bomb. That just sort
of wandered off from wherever. We drove beat up old
cars with bullet holes in them, with bald tires. You know,

(01:50:59):
if you change your every day, that was the best
way to do it. At one point I actually drove
a taxi there. It was an old Mercedes who has
been painted a bunch of time, all dinged up, and.

Speaker 5 (01:51:09):
It looked like what's called the service. There were just
no limits, no laws. He was amazing.

Speaker 20 (01:51:16):
We had all the money we wanted. We would at
the drop of a hat by an apartment. I had
probably twelve apartments in houses and moved between them night
after night, so you were never in the same place.

Speaker 1 (01:51:29):
As a fluent Arabic speaker, Beya is assigned the role
of gathering intelligence on the streets.

Speaker 20 (01:51:35):
It was mainly picking up sources and cars, and we
would put surveillance on places, watch people coming and going.

Speaker 1 (01:51:45):
Gradually, BEA's intelligence work starts to pay off. He begins
to gather information on Islamic jahat, and that intelligence leads
him to the religious leaders of one of Lebanon's main
Islamic sects.

Speaker 10 (01:52:00):
She is.

Speaker 20 (01:52:02):
We knew that there was a grouping of Shia clerics
that had started in nineteen eighty two, and we watch
this formation occur.

Speaker 5 (01:52:14):
You know, people would join and leave names.

Speaker 20 (01:52:18):
We didn't know much about, but basically the religious establishment
was coming to join in this Islamic resistance movement.

Speaker 1 (01:52:29):
The Shia sect are in the minority in the Muslim world,
but in Lebanon they make up around half the Muslim population,
and critically, they are the same branch of Islam as
America's key enemy in the Middle East Iran. Despite limitless

(01:52:51):
CIA resources, Bear's efforts to penetrate Islamic jihad now hit
a brick wall.

Speaker 20 (01:52:58):
These people are very, very good. They never showed themselves.
They worked out of tenements in Beirut. They didn't have
a name, they didn't have an office, they didn't keep
phone numbers.

Speaker 7 (01:53:11):
What we began to find out was that they were
very sophisticated in the structure of their organization, and in
my opinion, they were almost as good as we are.

Speaker 20 (01:53:21):
They were strictly family based, impossible to penetrate.

Speaker 1 (01:53:27):
So William Casey decides to turn to America's only friend
in the region Israel.

Speaker 7 (01:53:33):
Israel is a very very close ally both politically and
intelligence areas, and so we worked with them really as
our intelligence and political brothers and sisters.

Speaker 5 (01:53:43):
Really.

Speaker 1 (01:53:47):
The Israeli intelligence Service Mossad, is conducting its own operations
in Lebanon. Mosad passed on to Casey what they know.
The Israeli report says that an organization inside Lebanon is involved.

(01:54:12):
The Israelis identify a house in Damascus, the capital of
neighboring Syria, where they say a Syrian intelligence officer discussed
the attacks on the Marines three days before the bombing.
Present at the meeting was a grandfatherly man with a
black turban and brown robes. The Israelis say he is

(01:54:39):
the key figure in the militant Chiite movement in Lebanon,
Sheik Mohammad Hussein Fadlalah.

Speaker 19 (01:54:47):
The intelligence the CIA and the Israelis developed showed that Fadlala,
a Chite militant, was at the center and involved allegedly
in at least the main bombings in Beirut, including the
attack and the Marine barracks.

Speaker 1 (01:55:07):
Fadalala was born and raised in Iraq, but has spent
his adult life in Lebanon. He is an open critic
of America's presence in the region.

Speaker 20 (01:55:16):
Mohammad Hussein Fadlala naturally became a part of the anti Western.

Speaker 5 (01:55:24):
Coalition.

Speaker 20 (01:55:25):
If you like, you know, he's an Ayatola. He would
give blanket. Fatwas saying, yeah, it's fine to use force
to drive out an occupying power.

Speaker 1 (01:55:39):
Casey becomes convinced that Fadlala has to be connected to
the bombings and is a leading figure in Islamic jihad.
At last, Casey has a target. According to some Casey
now sets in motion an operation to assassinate the man
who he believes ordered the slaughter of hundreds of Americans.

(01:56:03):
In the months after the Barracks bombing, President Reagan reassures
the world that America will stay the course.

Speaker 18 (01:56:11):
The people of Lebanon must be given the chance to
resume their efforts to lead a normal life free from violence,
without the presence of unauthorized foreign forces on their soil.
And to this noble end, I rededicate the efforts of
the United States.

Speaker 1 (01:56:28):
But the truth is that neither the American military or
the American people have any desire to be embroiled in
another Vietnam.

Speaker 10 (01:56:37):
The military decided that no longer were they going to
let the politicians dribble them into a war, and a
war that the public doesn't support, I.

Speaker 21 (01:56:53):
Mean the American public.

Speaker 4 (01:56:54):
We're sick of a killing.

Speaker 1 (01:56:56):
But CIA Director William Casey is considering an operation again
since the Lebanese cleric Sheik Muhammad fad Lala, who he
suspects is the leader of the terrorist organization behind the
attacks on Americans. But before he can strike back, there
is a further humiliation for America. Just four months after

(01:57:20):
the bombing of the US Marines, America begins a full
withdrawal of its forces from Lebanon. Many in the CIA
believe it is sending the wrong message to the terrorists.

Speaker 10 (01:57:34):
Pulling Marines out Beyu was viewed as a victory by
the bad guys at large.

Speaker 15 (01:57:43):
It was sending a signal to terrorists in the region
that the Reagan administration was a paper tiger.

Speaker 1 (01:57:52):
Casey decides that it is up to the CIA to
exact revenge for this loss of face.

Speaker 20 (01:57:58):
Casey felt defeated because he was part of the administration
that convinced Reagan to go in to send the Marines in,
but to.

Speaker 1 (01:58:07):
Strike back, he must first rebuild the agency's damaged capabilities
in Lebanon. Casey's first action is to send in a
new station, Chief William Buckley.

Speaker 10 (01:58:23):
Buckley was a great man, very solid fellow. His expertise
was in paramilitary operations.

Speaker 1 (01:58:33):
Buckley, a former commander who had fought in Vietnam, will
be the CIA's most important man on the ground in Beirut.
Casey promises to provide Buckley with everything he needs to
combat the terrorist threat posed by Islamic Jahad. Buckley steps

(01:58:55):
up CIA paramilitary training, hostage rescue and the IP protection.
He trains Lebanese intelligence agents to work alongside his teams.
Back at CIA headquarters in Langley, Casey has fifty highly
trained analysts working exclusively on Islamic terrorism in the Middle East.

(01:59:18):
Out of this massively expanded operation, Buckley and Casey learn
a vital piece of intelligence.

Speaker 20 (01:59:27):
It takes a lot of time to figure out what's
going on. We figured that the Islamic Jihad was an
organization that they just borrowed a name.

Speaker 1 (01:59:39):
It emerges that Islamic Jihad is not a single body.
It is the name for a loose network of schia
eyed militant groups. The CIA learns that just one of
these groups is responsible for the attacks on American targets,
that group will become one of the most dangerous and
radical organizations to ever emerge from the Middle East. But

(02:00:03):
in nineteen eighty four, they are only just starting to
refer to themselves by name. They call themselves the Party
of God in Arabic Hesbalah.

Speaker 21 (02:00:22):
Everybody talks about his Bala today. At the time, I
never heard of his Bala.

Speaker 20 (02:00:28):
In April nineteen eighty three, we had no idea that
there would be his Baller. In fact, there was no
name for it.

Speaker 1 (02:00:35):
It is only now after the bombings that the group
starts to use their notorious name. Hesbalah has been created
by America's greatest enemy in the region, Iran. In nineteen
eighty two, its spiritual leader, Ayatollahmani, had sent a thousand

(02:00:59):
Iranian Revolutionary Regards to train Chiied fighters in Lebanon.

Speaker 20 (02:01:04):
His Bala was created by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Speaker 5 (02:01:09):
There's just no doubt about this. They it, they organized it, and.

Speaker 1 (02:01:15):
Now Hesbala is fighting Iran's war in Lebanon.

Speaker 20 (02:01:19):
It was an extension of the Iranian revolution if you like.
It was Iran's effort to open out the revolution to
the Arab world, and they did it very successfully, and
Lebanon was the first place.

Speaker 1 (02:01:34):
The CIA discovers that Iran is training Hesbala fighters and
the Lebanese Syrian border. Soon they receive other vital intelligence.
Both the Lebanese security forces and Israel's Mossad informed the
CIA that a senior figure in the Hesbala power structure
is none other than Sheik Mohammed Fadlala, the same man

(02:02:00):
who Casey believes is behind the attacks on the US
embassy and marine barracks. Casey becomes convinced that the best
way to strike at Hesbalah and send a clear signal
to America's enemies is to kill fad Lala. But Casey

(02:02:21):
faces a complication. Targeted assassinations are against the law.

Speaker 19 (02:02:27):
During Watergate, Gerald Ford, the President, issued in executive order
banning assassinations by any agency, including the CIA. So in
the eighties, Casey's hands were tied, and so he stretched
the law.

Speaker 1 (02:02:46):
In Washington, Casey turns to the CIA's formidable legal team
to try to convince President Reagan to change the law.
His argument is that a preemptive strike against fad Lala
to be seen as an act of self defense.

Speaker 10 (02:03:02):
In other words, if you've got rid of Hitler in
the thirties, you know, maybe twenty million people wouldn't have
died in World War Two, and that's a pretty good argument.

Speaker 1 (02:03:23):
Back in their route, William Buckley has a much more
immediate problem to deal with. The terrorists have started taking hostages.

Speaker 15 (02:03:32):
Hezblah has started kidnapping individual Americans with a view to
getting the United States out of the Middle East.

Speaker 1 (02:03:40):
Groups of armed men are seizing Westerns, especially Americans, from
the streaks of their route. Casey realizes that the CIA
needs to act, so Buckley starts formulating a daring rescue plan.

Speaker 20 (02:04:00):
He wanted to set up paramilitary operations. He said, let's
get people on the ground, Let's get Delta Force there.

Speaker 5 (02:04:06):
We're going to rescue these people.

Speaker 1 (02:04:08):
Buckley's plan is that the Green Berets and Israeli special
forces will enter the city by boat under the cover
of darkness. Simultaneously, in the city, Mossad agents will cause
a diversion by placing bombs outside the homes of suspected
Islamic terrorists. Then the Green berets will make their way

(02:04:29):
into a series of suspected locations and conduct stealth raids
to rescue the hostages and take out the terrorists. Dangerous
and daring though the plan is, Buckley believes that the
very nature of such a surprise assault will be what

(02:04:49):
ensures its success. On March the fifteenth, nineteen eighty four,
Casey gives Buckley the green light, but before he can
put his plan into action, Hesbala will strike again, and
this time the terrorists are coming after the CIA themselves.

(02:05:22):
Since arriving in Beirute, Buckley has been having an affair
with a beautiful young Lebanese woman called zenub unbeknown to Buckley,
Senoub works for Hesbala, monitoring every detail of Buckley's personal routine.
She passes on the intelligence to the Hesbala leadership.

Speaker 7 (02:05:43):
Buckley was very predictable in his routine going to and
from the embassy, and he was warned by a ranking
military official that looked, stop doing that, because you're putting
yourself at risk.

Speaker 1 (02:05:54):
Buckley ignores the warning, believing he is safe from attack
and oblivious to the news true identity. On a Friday morning,
William Buckley leaves his Beay Route apartment carrying top secret documents.

(02:06:15):
Taking the elevator to the basement carriage, he is joined
by a well dressed man in the basement, the man
suddenly strucks.

Speaker 20 (02:06:33):
They hit him over the head with a briefcase with
something hard in it.

Speaker 5 (02:06:38):
They grabbed him through him in the back of.

Speaker 20 (02:06:39):
A trunk of a car and drove off into the
southern suburbs.

Speaker 1 (02:06:48):
For Casey, the kidnapping of the Bayroot station chief is
an unprecedented disaster.

Speaker 19 (02:06:54):
This was a real earthquake for Casey and the CIA.

Speaker 7 (02:06:58):
William Buckley was a chief station and had volumes of
CIA information in his head, in his memory, and the
accounts were that Hesbolo was torturing Buckley daily.

Speaker 1 (02:07:15):
In September, proof that Buckley is still alive is released
to the CIA by his kidnappers.

Speaker 19 (02:07:25):
There appeared eventually a video that Casey saw of Buckley
being tortured.

Speaker 7 (02:07:33):
He was almost dead. He was slobbering. You could barely
understand what he was saying. The concern was the amount
of classified information that was being tortured out of station
Chief Buckley was causing serious damage to national security.

Speaker 1 (02:07:49):
Buckley's Lebanese agents began to vanish or turn up dead.
With the loss of the station chief and their intelligence
network in Lebanon clearly comes Casey fares the agency's entire
operation in the Middle East is in ruins.

Speaker 15 (02:08:07):
It showed the limits of American power. The United States
was not able to protect its intelligence representatives a brought
and Hesblah was able to hold this man, and the
United States apparently couldn't do anything about it.

Speaker 19 (02:08:25):
For one of their own to be tortured and killed
that way, and then for the video to get to
Casey and the CIA, it galvanized this idea of we
have to fight back, and if our hands are going
to be tied, if the rules, if their laws, if
their executive orders, to hell with them, were going to

(02:08:46):
get the job done.

Speaker 1 (02:08:52):
And any doubt that Casey may have about hitting back
the terrorists is removed when they strike yet again. A
Hesbala car bomb targets the US Embassy Annex building. Twenty
four are killed and ninety are wounded, but this time

(02:09:16):
the CIA linked the attack to Hesbalah. Casey turns to
remarkable top secret CIA aerial photographs would show a van
identical to the one used in the attack at a
Hesbalad training camp in the Lebanese desert. The photographs reveal

(02:09:38):
an exact mockup of the protective concrete barriers of the
embassy annex and between the obstacles tire tracks.

Speaker 15 (02:09:46):
If they looked carefully enough, the outline of the drive
that had to be made was exactly what you saw
right in front of the United States Embassy annex in Beirut.

Speaker 1 (02:10:01):
It is beyond doubt the Iranians are running a car
bomb school for Hesbalah terrorists in Washington, Casey makes his
position clear. They must cut off the head of the
Hesbala snake and kill the man they believe to be
its leader, Sheik Fadlala.

Speaker 15 (02:10:23):
In November of nineteen eighty four, President Reagan signs something
called a finding. Finding is a document that means the
President has found that a certain top secret activity is
in the interests of national security.

Speaker 1 (02:10:40):
The finding does not mean that the CIA can carry
out assassinations, but it does mean that they can train
local units who potentially can. This gives Casey some room
for maneuver. Casey can now sanction the killing, but the
CIA must still not be directly involved. Veteran journalist Bob

(02:11:01):
Woodwood claims that this is precisely what Casey does next.

Speaker 19 (02:11:08):
It was totally in off the book's operation. The CIA
was not directly involved, though Casey himself personally was.

Speaker 15 (02:11:17):
Covert action has always been available to presidents when they
do not wish to use the United States military.

Speaker 1 (02:11:27):
According to Woodward, Casey hunts for a third party to
execute the assassination.

Speaker 15 (02:11:33):
William Casey looked elsewhere to find a partner to launch
a strike against the leadership of Hesbola and Lebanon, and
that partner was Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 1 (02:11:44):
Although denied by Saudi Arabia and the American government. According
to Woodward, in early nineteen eighty five, the Saudi Arabian
ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar, is ordered by his
king to cooperate with Casey in every respect.

Speaker 19 (02:12:00):
Casey and band Aar met in one of these classic
CIA secret meetings at Bandar's house and walked out into
the garden.

Speaker 1 (02:12:09):
According to Woodwood, the Saudis, like Casey, believe that shaikfad
Lala is the leader of Hesbalah and so agree to
fund the operation.

Speaker 19 (02:12:19):
Casey gave Bandar a card with the bank account number
ands had transferred the three million dollars for this operation
into this account.

Speaker 1 (02:12:31):
Casey agrees to the Saudis taking operational control and they
agree to using a former British SAS officer to head
the mission.

Speaker 19 (02:12:40):
It was Saudi intelligence, a former SAS officer and Casey
and they planned this operation.

Speaker 1 (02:12:54):
The SAS officer arrives in Beirut. To keep the CIA
out of the picture, he recruits Lebanese as to carry
out the mission.

Speaker 15 (02:13:03):
The goal here was to get the Lebanese to do
the work. Your boots on the ground, if you will,
to try to find Hezbolla's leaders and deal with them.

Speaker 1 (02:13:14):
The plan is simple, to strike at Fadlala using the
weapon of the terrorists.

Speaker 19 (02:13:20):
You know, Irony of Ironies made a carbomb.

Speaker 1 (02:13:27):
One agent is ordered to procure a large quantity of explosives.
Another is to choose the vehicle. Money is paid to
informants to make sure that they know where Fadlala will
be at a certain time. The man chosen to drive
the vehicle is Elie Hobika, the leader of a Christian
militia group. The bomb will be set off by a

(02:13:51):
timed remote which Habika will activate before leaving the scene.
Everything is set. The team is given the green light
and the operation to kill Fadlala is set in motion.

(02:14:13):
A pickup truck is driven into the crowded Bierre al
Abed neighborhood in South Bay Route, concealed beneath crates of
vegetables seven hundred and fifty pounds of explosives. The truck
is parked across the road from Sheik Fadlala's house. Intelligence

(02:14:37):
says that Fadlala will soon be returning there. From the mosque,
lookout supposition to alert the driver of the truck, Elie Hobika,
of Fadlala's departure. At approximately two pm, Fadlala leaves the
mosque after Friday prayers. One of the lookouts identifies Fadlala

(02:15:00):
and the signal is relayed to her beaker to prepare
the bomb for detonation, but then a woman stops Fadlallah.
She asks a religious question. They need to delay the detonation.

(02:15:25):
Fadlala is too far from the bomb, but it's too late.

(02:15:53):
The blast kills eighty three people. Two hundred and eighty
three lie wounded. The victims are mainly schoolgirls, women and children.
Buildings up to six hundred feet away are destroyed. Despite
the size of the explosion, the bombers have missed their target.

(02:16:17):
Fadalala is just outside the blast radius, surrounded by his supporters.
The cleric simply walks away.

Speaker 5 (02:16:26):
They did not kill him.

Speaker 19 (02:16:27):
They killed eighty innocent people, and Fadlala escaped.

Speaker 1 (02:16:34):
Those of the scene are under no illusion as to
who is behind the attack. At CIA headquarters, Casey receives
word that the operation has gone horrifically wrong.

Speaker 20 (02:16:58):
This bombing of Fadlala was a turning point. I mean,
anybody had any doubts about the West were immediately convinced
that these guys are crazy. They're going to slaughter us
and kill us all for no purpose at all, and.

Speaker 1 (02:17:15):
Worse is to come. It later transpires that the CIA's
intelligence on fad Lalah from Israeli and Lebanese sources is
deeply flawed. The man the CIA had targeted for death
is not the head of Hesbalah. Over the next few years,
the agency learns that Fadlala has never been involved in

(02:17:38):
any terrorist attacks against America.

Speaker 20 (02:17:41):
There was no evidence, none, zero, at all that he
was directly involved in tax on the West or Israel.
He was not an active operational member of his balla
never at any time.

Speaker 1 (02:18:00):
To this day, Prince Bandar and both the Saudi Arabian
and American governments deny any involvement in the attempt on
Fadlala's life. They say that rogue Lebanese militias undertook the
operation alone, and those who worked alongside Casey at the
highest levels of the CIA also claim he was not involved.

Speaker 10 (02:18:24):
I think a lot of people have ascribed it to
something that Casey put together with whatever, and that's not true.
Casey had nothing to do with it.

Speaker 1 (02:18:35):
Despite these public denials, it appears that William Casey himself
is prepared for the story of his personal involvement to
go public. In the years before his death. In nineteen
eighty seven, Casey agrees to a series of interviews with

(02:18:56):
award winning reporter Bob Woodward.

Speaker 19 (02:19:01):
I met with Casey and talked to him forty eight times.
I talked to him on the phone, traveled with him
on his CIA plane when I was the only one
with him. I had dinner with him in his house.
He had breakfast with him in his house.

Speaker 1 (02:19:17):
Woodward eventually reveals Casey's involvement in the botched assassination attempt
in his book Veil The Secret Wars of the CIA.

Speaker 20 (02:19:27):
Now, why Casey would tell Bob wood were this story,
I don't know.

Speaker 7 (02:19:31):
I think Casey talked to Woodward quite openly to leave
a legacy behind and let people know what he wanted
them to know.

Speaker 1 (02:19:45):
Over the years, there has been speculation as to why
Casey would talk to Woodward. Many people believe it was
because Casey wanted to ensure that the CIA would learn
from its mistakes in their route.

Speaker 7 (02:20:00):
We underestimated our enemy in that case, and it came
back to Bidis.

Speaker 22 (02:20:04):
Prior to ninety eleven. The terrorist attack on the Marine
Compound in nineteen eighty three was the largest terrorist attack
against Americans in the history of the United States.

Speaker 1 (02:20:17):
Because of intelligence failures in nineteen eighty three, hundreds of Americans,
including two hundred and forty one Marines, lost their lives.
It is a loss that many refused to forget.

Speaker 22 (02:20:30):
Beirot lives in the hearts of Beyroot veterans because there's
not been a day that's gone by that I don't
think about it and I don't remember it.

Speaker 4 (02:20:41):
KC.

Speaker 1 (02:20:41):
Two was adamant that the deaths of the Marines. The
CIA agents and embassy staff who died in the previous
bombing would not be in vain. The CIA desperately needed
to employ more effective tactics against the extremists.

Speaker 10 (02:20:56):
Casey figured out that we had to do something better
about arm maring terrorism.

Speaker 1 (02:21:02):
The critical lesson that Casey learned was that the CIA
needed to find ways of getting better intelligence on its
enemies and finding more accurate ways of killing them. So
a year after the Fadlala attack, Casey sets up a

(02:21:23):
new CIA department, the counter Terrorism Center.

Speaker 10 (02:21:28):
It brought together the espionage people and the people from
the Directorate of Intelligence who worked together for virtually the
first time in instrument, and this was a revolution.

Speaker 1 (02:21:42):
This revolution at the agency ensures that, unlike in Beirut,
the CIA will now always try to have its own
agents on the ground, providing highly accurate intelligence direct to
the CIA's best analysts. They will no longer need to
repeat the mistakes of Route, where they were forced to
rely on foreign intelligence and local Lebanese to carry out

(02:22:05):
their missions. In nineteen eighty six, the counter Terrorism Center
starts developing a new way to accurately target its enemies.
An unmanned aerial vehicle.

Speaker 10 (02:22:24):
That was the beginning of where we are today with
the lethal draws.

Speaker 6 (02:22:31):
That was the chalasis right there.

Speaker 1 (02:22:42):
This idea borne out of a failure of such tactics
as the Carbone, would result in the development of highly
sophisticated lethal drones. It would take a generation to be perfected,
but drones are now an integral and highly effective weapon
in the CIA's campaign against terrorism.

Speaker 19 (02:23:03):
It is a new era, and if you think about
what Casey was dabbling in with cheek fadlala, it's small
change compared to what goes on now.

Speaker 1 (02:23:14):
The CIA continues to evolve in the face of new
terrorist threats and has achieved some startling successes. In many cases,
the extents of those successes are only now becoming declassified.